Sharon and our sweet Jesus

Friday, April 17, 2026

(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)

 Sharon and our sweet Jesus

You have delivered my soul from death,

                   my eyes from tears,

                   my feet from stumbling.

                       —Psalm 116. 8

Deliverance

There were actually three disciples

on the way to Emmaus, but one stopped off

at a nearby village to visit her sister

so she never met the risen Jesus.

Had to hear about it afterwards.

 

At a church picnic once I watched

as a softball, a long foul ball,

traced its fateful arc right toward

the head of a three-year old who never saw

her dad reach out and casually catch it.

 

Our granddaughter, two months old,

is cared for through all kinds of weather

and infections and sleepless nights,

and will likely never hear of it.

 

I have been saved so many times,

delivered from death or at least stumbling,

and of most of them I am unaware.

Even without full knowledge I am learning

gratitude and wonder.

 

Some days my soul is like a three-year old

at a picnic being greeted with inexplicable joy

as if the subject of an amazing story.

• • • Steve Garnaas-Holmes

Yesterday I thought about dying, today I’m thinking about life. I appreciate that God enrolls Margaret and I in this great school of life, this great wide plain to run around clear to the borders, day after day.

But though we frolic at play in the fields of the Lord, there are snakes and there are demons, and our eyes are not clear enough or spiritually sharp enough to see them in time. It doesn’t just take a village for us to survive; it takes angels and Holy Spirit and the sharp eyes of Jesus to keep us safe.

We aren’t always physically rescued of course, it’s just that SO OFTEN WE ARE. As the poet said, “Even without full knowledge I am learning gratitude and wonder.” That’s not just a side effect of these deliverances; it can easily be seen as the POINT.

I looked for references to a back yard killer snake in Peter Matthiesen’s book about the Lord’s fields, but could not. I did, however, find the not-quite-sane words of Lewis Moon, a missionary pilot with little fuel and no inclination to tell anyone his actual whereabouts. “I’m at play in the fields of the Lord,” he kept repeating on the radio. A few minutes later:

His breath came again, and with it a new exaltation; on such a morning, all light and purity and color, even death must be magnificent. He tried to work himself into his parachute. But his vast solar energy was instantly exhausted; he sat there gasping.

“Hoo, boy,” he said, trying in vain to cheer himself. He bound his arm in the straps of the chute, and grasping the strut, inched out onto the wing; how cold it was, in this cold light of heaven! He was afraid again. He clutched the parachute to his chest, and with his other arm—the one run through the strap—he hugged the strut. Now he pulled the cord and the silk bulged at the crack. Now you’ve done it. This time you’ve really done it.

The wind tore at his face, and his arms ached. Short of the clearing, a mile and a half above the trees, he kicked himself backward and away. Shoving his free arm among the straps, then clasping both arms tight to his chest, he closed his eyes against the gut-sucking suspense, and the blow of the silk snapped open; he fell the length of a long howl before the impact all but wrenched his arms out of their sockets. He blinked, in tears; he was alive again, laughing idiotically in the clean sunlight of the upper air, legs dangling and swaying like the legs of a rag doll, drifting, drifting down through the great morning, in a wild silence like the wake of bells. (from Chapter 10)

I found the deadly snake instead in Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, and not in the green flowing African grassfield I thought I remembered but in a small, backyard chicken house. Ruth May, the youngest of four daughters in a missionary family and the daughter most curious about African life, died almost immediately after a green mamba snake, hungry for the chickens and their eggs, bit her. Kingsolver tells the family’s story as Faulkner told his in As I Lay Dying, each character taking their turn speaking of what they experienced.

Are there judgments about religion or morality in any of these books? The snake makes none. Kingsolver’s reference to Herman Hesse’s thought about moral progress at least gives me something to think about.

The way to innocence, to the uncreated and to God, leads on, not back, not back to the wolf or to the child, but ever further into sin, ever deeper into human life. – Steppenwolf

But seriously, Isaiah’s vision, inspiration for all those Quaker paintings, the last two lines of which we printed on our professional business card decades ago and are still there, makes more moral sense to me. Pay attention, God seem to be saying. Things are not yet as they will someday be.

The wolf will live with the lamb,

    the leopard will lie down with the goat,

the calf and the lion and the yearling together;

    and a little child will lead them.

The cow will feed with the bear,

    their young will lie down together,

    and the lion will eat straw like the ox.

The infant will play near the cobra’s den,

    and the young child will put its hand into the viper’s nest.

They will neither harm nor destroy

    on all my holy mountain,

for the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord

    as the waters cover the sea.

Our friend Sharon Hall was in the Lincoln hospital sometime in the 1980’s. She would recover from whatever put her there. She asked me to read Psalm 27 to her, but she knew it well enough to read it to me, without words, and so she did.

Let me gaze on the beauty of the Lord

    and to seek him in his temple.

For in the day of trouble

    he will keep me safe in his dwelling;

he will hide me in the shelter of his sacred tent

    and set me high upon his rock.

(Acts 5, Psalm 27, Matthew 4, John 6)

(posted at www.davesandel.net)

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